Quest Q and A Spring 2010 : Page 11
we were also reassured by the fact that arctools had already been used by hundreds of jd edwards users worldwide and had been built and fine-tuned by jd edwards experts. can you talk us through the different stages of the project? we began the project with a one month “proof of concept” before making our final decision to purchase the product. the “proof of concept” was really beneficial as it allowed us to not only validate the product, but also to gain a thorough knowledge of how the purge and archive process works. we then extensively tested each module that we wanted to purge and archive: a/r, a/p, g/l, job cost, purchase orders, inventory, time card history, expense Management, custom estimating Module, and our custom sales forecast Module. this was done by using data in our test environment. once we had validated the purge and archive rules, we then began the purge and archive process over our production data. after purging was complete and the g/l detail had been summarized, we performed some database reorganization in order to remove fragmentation and optimize the database performance of the production tables. the final step in the project was to enable access to the archive for our business users. this was straightforward because we are using the standard jd edwards interface to access archived data. what, if anything, would you do differently? i would not make any changes to the process we followed – we completed the project on time, on budget and with positive results. what were the results of the project? application performance improved after archiving over 35,000,000 rows from our production database. over 20,000,000 rows were archived from the account ledger table (f0911). our data conversion during the 9.0 upgrade was able to complete in a very reasonable timeframe. during our last upgrade the data conversion process took approximately thirty-six hours and during the 9.0 upgrade this took less than twenty-four hours. tell us a little about the project team. we had a core group of three working on the project. in addition, there were others from it involved in the initial investigative stages (knowledge gathering to understand the impact on other applications, as well as server and network impact) as well as during testing. given the multiple projects we had in process (upgrade planning included), i was the project sponsor as well as project manager and one of the business analysts. also working on the project was a dba, a cnc administrator/systems administrator and someone from the arctools/whitehouse consultants team. tell us a little bit more about running the project remotely. one of the things we really liked about arctools was the fact that a lot of the project was done remotely. this not only kept consulting costs down but it also meant that there was less of a time impact on our internal team. we were able to work on the project in small time chunks, giving us time for other day-to-day responsibilities. of course, when a lot of the work is being done remotely, you have to be extra vigilant when it comes to communication. however, thanks to clear processes that were put in place and the expertise and professionalism of the whitehouse/arctools team, we avoided any communication issues and the project ran very smoothly. what advice do you have for others planning a purging and archiving project? there are three main pieces of advice i would give to anyone planning a purge and archive project. first, i would stress the importance of having a cross-functional team. you need to have both technical and functional people involved, ideally; a dba, a cnc administrator, business analysts and business users. secondly, an extensive testing phase is imperative. testing is particularly important for custom tables to ensure that the archive scripts provide the results required. arctools makes testing easy due to its ‘proof mode’ and also due to the fact that you can easily undertake ‘a reverse purge.’ finally, it really helps to work with consultants like those from arctools and whitehouse who are not only experts in data purging, but who also have a deep knowledge of the jd edwards application and table structures. what about purging and archiving going forward? arctools makes purging and archiving erp data easy. we got some help from the arctools and whitehouse team initially but we now feel comfortable purging and archiving our data independently. every year we plan to archive an additional year’s worth of data. the benefits can be seen not just during the upgrade process, but also on a daily basis by end users and the it department – with less data in the production environment, end- user queries run more efficiently and database maintenance is simplified. 11
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